Mankind is from Mars

“War demands a leap of imagination as extraordinary and fantastic as the phenomenon itself,” psychologist James Hillman writes in the first pages of his demanding and daring new book, “A Terrible Love of War.” What blocks our ability to comprehend war, in Hillman’s perspective, is “our endemic national disease: the addiction to innocence.”

War has always been with us. “During the five thousand six hundred years of written history,” Hillman painfully reminds us, “fourteen thousand six hundred wars have been recorded.” Beyond the recorded wars are the “centuries of nameless bodies in unheralded fields.” The Greek philosopher Heraclitus says that “war is the father of us all.” To understand the enduring nature of war, Hillman writes, we must understand “the myths, philosophy, and theology of war’s deepest mind.” We must acquaint ourselves with the god of war -- Mars -- the divinity who “rages, strikes death, stirs panic, driving individual humans mad and collective societies blind.”

To speak of peace or disarmament, to hope of ever preventing war, we must understand “the madness of its love,” the force that held Gen. George S. Patton in its thrall when, surveying the havoc of the battlefield, he proclaimed, “I love it. God help me I do love it so. I love it more than my life.”

Hillman, 78, has written more than 20 books, including the bestselling “The Soul’s Code,” “The Force of Character,” and (with Michael Ventura) “We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse.” Trained as a psychoanalyst in Zurich, where he studied with Jung, Hillman is an innovator in depth psychology.

The primary tool of depth psychology is penetration, digging below conventional constructs into the layer of the mind which is poetic, mythic. “War,” he writes, “asks for this kind of penetration, else its horrors remain unintelligible and abnormal.”

Writing “A Terrible Love of War” was “as hard as anything I’ve tried to do,” Hillman says quietly, sitting in a lush hotel garden in Century City. “I more or less collapsed toward the end, and I couldn’t finish it.” His book warns of its intent: “This book seeks to do what war itself achieves: destabilize, desubjectivize, destroy. The writer comes out of the book a casualty, and the reader too, or at least all shook up.”

“A Terrible Love of War” -- a book Hillman suggests might be his last -- is also his most personal. “Mars is the god of engagement, and you can’t write about Mars unless you are directly engaged,” he says. He looks back on himself as that “puny kid (with glasses)” growing up in Atlantic City, N.J., playing with tin soldiers, listening to boxing matches on the radio, “already in training for this book on combat.”

The most significant piece of biography to color “A Terrible Love of War” was Hillman’s experience, beginning in 1944, when -- at age 18 -- he was drafted into the Navy. As a pharmacist mate second class, he was first assigned to a ward of the war-deafened, did night duty with amputees and worked for more than a year as “special assistant to the war-blinded.” “What I knew of battle,” he writes with elegant precision, “was only its remnants.”

A series of paradoxes

Hillman takes care with words. He will not abide the casual use of the word “wounded.” His indignation ignites: “We have no idea what we’ve created in Iraq! The death numbers ... only on page I-don’t-know-what of the third section of the newspaper do we get the wounded numbers. And ‘wounded’ is a word that is so easy to use and it actually means ‘maiming, disfigurement ... unbelievable burns ... blinding ...’ How much of America is reshaping their bodies to look like magazine ads? These people are being blasted apart!”

“A Terrible Love of War” is a dense, tightly constructed work. One chews through it slowly as it segues from scholarly treatise to psychoanalytic session, from poetic essay to philosophical proof.

He assumes a writing style to accommodate his subject. “Abrupt. Disturbing.” He acknowledges his tone as “offensive,” his method “an assault on entrenched thought.” He notes that “readers may find themselves joining an underground resistance, looking for weak spots and exposed positions. It will seem as if the book is written less to cajole the reader than to knock him out flat.”

He structures the book as a series of paradoxes: The first chapter is titled “War Is Normal.” The second is “War Is Inhuman.” How can something be inhuman if it’s normal? Unsettling? That’s the point. “War Is Sublime,” the third chapter, explores the beauty inside the horror of war, the fusion of death and loveliness.

The fourth section, “Religion Is War,” is what Hillman calls “an attempt at shock therapy.” He lays out the grave proposition that religious belief -- in the form of intolerance -- brings us to war. Though he critiques three major monotheisms, especially their fundamentalist wings, he bears down particularly hard on Christianity because, he writes, “the United States wields the most military power and is at the same time the most Christian of nations.”

Hillman’s dismay at what he regards as the endemic American innocence is much on his mind. In conversation, he circles back to the subject again and again. The hallmark of this malaise, he says, is “not knowing life’s darkness and not wanting to know, either.”

“Ever since 9/11, people have been referring to 9/11 as a ‘wake-up call,’ ” he says. “Why is it necessary to keep ‘waking us up’? What is this thing about the United States that needs to have an alarm clock day after day after day?

“We are all in this war, and if we’re not in this war, we’re asleep. We’re paying for it. We’re complicitous in it. The incredible cluster bombs, shrapnel wounds that are in the thousands of people overseas are partly our responsibility. Our addiction to innocence is so strong that we can’t handle it, so we are happy to go on sleeping. And it takes ever more louder alarms to wake us up.”

By nature, Hillman writes, he is a “child of Mars.” He likes to “sharpen oppositions and set fire to the passions of thought.” In an evening talk at the downtown library, he lit the fuse.

“I will not march for peace, nor will I pray for it, because it falsifies all it touches.... Peace is simply a bad word,” he reads in an incantatory voice. “Truce, yes; cease-fire, yes; surrender, victory, mediation, brinkmanship, standoff -- these words have content, but peace is darkness falling.” The first definition of “peace” in the Oxford English Dictionary, he tells his audience, is “the absence of war.”

A man who loathes war who does not profess to “wanting” peace? During the Q&A; there are flustered faces and ruffled sensibilities, combustible passions.

“The word ‘peace’ is a cover-up,” Hillman tells one questioner. “It keeps Americans innocent! We have to recognize the primacy of war in the cosmos.” One woman asks, “The Buddhists have a word, ‘om’ -- that means peace, that does not mean a ‘lack of war.’ It means something else. Maybe our definition of ‘peace’ is just a Western idea?

“There are other thoughts about peace, certainly,” Hillman answers. “But in our Western society -- and we have the most weapons and are the most dedicated to war -- our notion of peace is still ‘darkness falling,’ ” he says, using a phrase from Marguerite Duras. “It’s a way of escaping from the inhumanity that is in the cosmos.”

“That’s sad!” says his questioner, her voice quavering.

“Can we sit with that without going to sleep?” Hillman entreats the audience. “You see, we’re not going to solve the problems until we can stay awake. Vigilantly! That’s the difficulty. That’s what therapy is all about. Waking up! That’s what Socrates says. That’s what Jesus says. Wake up! Wake up! But you don’t wake up unless you can face something -- such as the Buddha himself faced....We want to find a solution ... we want to go back to sleep.”

Mars -- the Western god of war -- is also the god of speed, sweeping us up in his rush. “There’s no looking back in this mode,” Hillman explains, “no rear mirror. Nothing. Just forward. Attack, attack.” Mars’ rush to war can, however, be slowed down -- or tamed -- through deliberation. In the case of the Iraq war, Hillman believes, our Senate failed to do just that.

“Senator after senator said ‘This is the hardest decision of my life’ and then voted for the war.” One poignant image of the attempt to slow down Mars was Sen. Robert Byrd in his long, lonely filibuster against the Senate vote.

From the audience: “Fifteen million people marched against the war. Wasn’t that a way to slow the rush?”

“Yes,” Hillman says, “they marched against a war. But what did they march ‘for’? And now there is a war. What now?”

When William James called for “the moral equivalent of war,” he was asking, “How can we get the United States to have a great moral cause, that can unite us to do marvelous things?” Hillman asks, might there be “an aesthetic equivalent to war?”

Rechanneling fury

At a time when arts education has been all but eliminated from school budgets, it’s a startling concept. Could the same intensity of engagement that is brought to war-making be directed to a positive, equally life-changing force? Are there other ways, Hillman writes, “for civilization to normalize martial fury ... and open to the sublime?”

“If every young person had an intense, passionate interest in making something, in groups or alone, in which they were engaged with their gut and their blood and their heart and their soul -- in which it’s a life-or-death struggle -- as anyone knows who tries to work at something with passionate intensity, would that be an ‘aesthetic equivalent of war’?” he asks.

Toward the end of the evening, a woman says: “I’ve been to a lot of these lectures, I’ve never had the feeling that I have sitting here tonight -- that everyone is being ‘pulled up’ as opposed to being ‘talked to’ about someone’s theory. I appreciate hearing someone express how difficult it is to sit with what it means to be an American, what it means to grapple with war.”

“Let me explain something,” Hillman says in conclusion, “I’m not here to give an answer. I’m concerned as a human being and as a psychologist with our resistances that have allowed so much to happen. So that if we were back in Europe in the ‘30s ... we’d look back and say, ‘How did it all happen? How did we let go of our country?’ ”

Louise Steinman wrote “The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War” (Plume) and is cultural programs director for the Library Foundation of Los Angeles. Responses can be e-mailed to Calendar@latimes .com.